Three Steps To Solving Influencer Marketing Fraud

Social media fraud is not new. As a founder of a startup that is in the business of digital influence, I am acutely aware of just how pervasive this problem is.

The New York Times recently published an investigative report on the social media industry’s “black market” -- the continued viability of fraudulent accounts and interactions on social media platforms that persists despite growing criticism and scrutiny. Citing business and court records, theinvestigation focused on a company that sells Twitter followers and retweets, the majority of which were found to be fraudulent. The company boasts more than 200,000 customers, from celebrities to athletes to social media influencers, among others called out in the report.

According to Rachel Botsman, the leading expert on how technology is transforming trust, we are in the middle of what is considered to be the third fundamental shift in trust in our society’s history: the shift from institutional trust to distributed trust, shared among networks of people. Powered by the mass, global adoption of social media and the democratization of information through technology, it is a shift that continues to impact every arena from politics to business. This has resulted in the birth of an influencer marketing industry that is estimated to grow 38% in its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years.

Unfortunately, when there’s a financial opportunity of that scale, fraud is sure to follow. However, now that marketers are using influencer marketing more than ever before, I am pleased to see conversation around a solution happening openly among the marketing community.

Here’s a potential roadmap to how we solve the fraud problem together.

To start, we must all acknowledge a shared responsibility across multiple parties to combat this challenge. Influencers, marketers and platform companies all own a piece of the problem and need to work together to solve it. As Adobe alluded to in its “Mean Streets” commercial a few years ago, some marketers have fallen into the trap of just needing to hit a quarterly vanity metric and, in doing so, got addicted to shortcut methods of achieving that metric.

Platform companies, including the social networks, have been wrestling with fake accounts for years, but it’s no secret that these accounts have resulted in some revenue going into their pockets. As The New York Times pointed out, some consumers are going to attempt to stand out among the increasingly competitive crowd of influencers by inflating audience sizes or engagement volumes with the swipe of a credit card, despite putting in the effort to create beautiful and authentic content. Combine that with the fact that the social platforms will eventually throttle organic reach in order to drive more influencers to promote their content via ads, and you have a propagating cycle of behavior that forces fraud to flourish.

Establish common standards and acceptable thresholds for fraud.

Once we acknowledge our shared responsibility, we can openly accept that some degree of fraud will always exist in influencer marketing. Similar to the force of gravity, the larger the audience of a social media account, the more bots it will attract statistically -- even if that account isn’t trying to attract them. Once we accept this, we can leverage lessons from the financial industry and come together around a common set of standards and acceptable thresholds for fraud and other questionable behaviors within influencer marketing.

We don’t necessarily need an influence “credit score” like the days of Klout, but there is no question that digital influence has become a form of currency in its own right, and financial credit scores have been working for multiple decades now, as long as bankers use the information properly.

For example, influencers, marketers and platform companies should come together to create a database to identify fraudulent activity and questionable behaviors. Within this database, we could identify influencers whose audiences indicate a high percentage of bot activity (including followers and engagements), influencers who too frequently take down content they were paid to create and those who participate in comment pods, to name a few. And for those influencers who are providing proven value, they should be identified and rewarded within this database. The demand for the time of influencers who are ethical and transparent should be worth more.

Leverage technology and data to enforce the standards.

After common standards or thresholds are established, technology and data need to be leveraged to enforce those standards. Data science and machine learning algorithms can be used to analyze the followers and engagements that are connected to influencers to see which are coming from accounts with very few posts, an above average following-to-follower ratio, a short lifespan and a location in regions known for having bot farms.

The database of known fraud accounts and influencers with proven value could eventually have an application programming interface so that all participating parties could leverage that data in their influencer marketing operations. At Mavrck, we are working to one day contribute to a database like this, leveraging the millions of profiles and billions of posts, likes and comments we’ve indexed to help report fraudulent accounts.

In the meantime, we urge marketers to think of influencers as more than just a one-dimensional tool for reach. Those who are leveraging influencers (or any of their euphemistic complements: thought leaders, subject-matter experts, creators) for reach and frequency aloneare missing the point.That’s like using your smartphone to only make phone calls.

Influencers, by definition, have such rich knowledge and expertise. To not leverage them as insightful collaborators throughout the entire marketing process (research, strategy, planning, creative, media and measurement) is a missed opportunity most marketers today can not afford to lose. Those who take advantage of influencers' multidimensional value will end up creating more empathetic, trustworthy relationships with consumers.